I agree with Brendan, ethical concerns are at different levels when
dealing with the general public or employees, especially if within the
boundaries of internal corporate systems.
First, I would like to make a distinction between web analytics and
journalizing.
Web analytics should not be used to track individuals, but rather to
find actionable patterns that you can act upon. Just like in a
statistics sampling, you don't have to use all the data, and you don't
focus on an individual entry, but you can still come up with valid
conclusions.
Journalizing (to record in a journal) goal is to track the actions of
an individual person. This can be a perfectly valid scenario where
"non repudiation" of an action is important (such as in financial
transactions). This is usually done at the system level and is stored
in secured databases, not using WA solutions. For internal systems,
especially in financial institutions, it is best practice to monitor
abnormal employee activities (for example, as a bank manager, a person
I know had access to Celine Dion's bank account details, obviously,
there was some monitoring to avoid non-justifiable data access).
Second point: is it ethical?
In the specific example that started this thread, I would speak to the
IT department because they are very likely to already have something
in place... and probably it's something not widely publicized within
the organization. Now, from a marketing perspective, I don't think it
would be ethical to use that data in the way it was described. Would
it be acceptable for marketing to read each employee email in the hope
of understanding what everyone is doing? Obviously not. Is it
acceptable to monitor email activities to filter or act on viruses,
spam, adult oriented or confidential leaks received or sent by
employees? Absolutely. It should be the same for the use of web sites
and other systems: act on the exception, not the individual person.
S.Hamel
http://blog.immeria.net
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